Winter 2023
Vol. 34 No. 1
Dreaming

Dreaming at the Edges

Helena Daly & Karen Jaenke, Editors

In this issue, ReVision explores transgressions of the boundaries of the typical Western self as generated in and through dreams. Our dreams travel across an unbounded space-time continuum, freely transgressing the boundaries of atomistic selfhood and object-oriented reality, playing within a fluid and permeable topography.

Articles explore luminous disclosures appearing in liminal dream spaces: the transitional dreaming-into-waking state, the interiority-exteriority continuum, expansion and contraction within the elasticity of the subtle body, and mutually-interpenetrating intersubjectivity. Thus, the shimmering edges of the self appear illumined through the animating and radically-redefining landscapes of dreams.

Photo: Karen Jaenke

Editors’ Introduction: Dreaming at the Edges

Helena Daly & Karen Jaenke

Dreaming with the Collective: Invitation to Interiority

Karen Jaenke, PhD

Hypnopompic Encounter: Death’s Shadow and Light Between the Realms

Helena Daly, PhD

Poem: The Quest

Meredith Sabini, PhD

Expansion and Contraction in the Dreaming Body

Karen Jaenke, PhD

Heart-Knowing, Somatic Dreaming, and Transsubjectivity: A Scholarly Personal Narrative

Daniel Deslauriers, PhD

Poem: Boundaries

Meredith Sabini, PhD

ABSTRACTS

Winter 2023
Vol. 34 No. 1

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Daly, H., Hypnopompic Encounter: Death’s Shadow and Light Between the Realms. ReVision, 34(1), 13-23. doi:10.4298/REVN.34.1.00-00
The dream-waking state (the hypnopompic state of consciousness) that opens between sleeping and waking realms is an important state of consciousness, yet largely forgotten, overlooked and misunderstood. The hypnopompic state is rarely differentiated from the hypnagogic state—the state of consciousness that opens at the other end of the spectrum, prior to falling asleep, yet crucial and significant differences do exist. This article details the differences, illustrating them with an extraordinary, personal hypnopompic encounter, and ancient knowledge, depth psychological and transpersonal perspectives. Doing so, will highlight the dream-waking state as a third state of being—a liminal state through which higher states of awareness, embodied knowledge, healing, and the workings of soul and its relation to death and beyond can be known and experienced.

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Deslauriers, D., Heart-Knowing, Somatic Dreaming, and Transsubjectivity: A Scholarly Personal Narrative. ReVision, 34(1), 13-23. doi:10.4298/REVN.34.1.00-00
A narrative inquiry, triggered by a hypnopompic dream, unfolds the social- somatic reality of heart knowing. This inquiry discloses a complex relational topography within which childhood memories, therapeutic encounter, existential issues around elder care and somatic relational-knowing co-mingle within the dream meaning-making process. Dreams’ concerns being at their core relational, it is suggested that intersubjectivity is pervasive, and perhaps primary, in meaning-making. In turn, dream insights can infuse and inform a relationship’s course. Opening the question of what informs the experience of heart knowing, the notion of transsubjectivity is explored. The latter is viewed as an incipient, yet patterning, knowing field.

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Jaenke, K., Dreaming with the Collective: Invitation to Interiority. ReVision, 34(1), 00-00. doi:10.4298/REVN.34.1.00-00
This column examines a dream that highlights interiority as a defining feature of the sacred feminine. The central dream image—a numinous box, containing a series of nested boxes, similar to the Russian dolls—emphasizes receding degrees of hiddenness, interiority, depth and subtlety. While the interior-exterior distinction mirrors female and male genitalia, more fundamentally it denotes two prime ways of orienting and organizing human consciousness, two alternative approaches to life. The exterior orientation of patriarchal societies predisposes us to extract all meaning, purpose and value from the external world. Collective loss of access to the richness of an interior universe of depth, afflicting both society and planet, finds correction in a fundamental shift in orientation from exterior to interior.

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Jaenke, K., Expansion and Contraction in the Dreaming Body. ReVision, 34(1), 00-00. doi:10.4298/REVN.34.1.00-00
Dreams amplify dynamics of expansion and contraction in the body, which can be beneficially engaged during hypnopompia to resolve the constrictions of trauma and open to the expansiveness of joy. Gendlin’s focusing method (of attending to the felt sense as a guide to growth directions and leading to expansive possibilities) is applied to several of the author’s extraordinary dreams. The somatic-energetic stirrings of dreams are revealed as encompassing the full continuum of expansion and contraction, akin to the cosmos itself. Consciously engaging states of contraction awakened by dreams resolves trauma’s residue in the energy body, while shifting contraction towards spaciousness and joy. Mindfully participating in the somatic dynamics of expansion and contraction conveys felt participation in the elemental dynamics of the universe.